The business, collaborative labour, and techniques of formal integration in the production of MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

The term “integration” has been a leading framework in studies of musical theatre and film musicals to describe the relations between musical numbers and story, as well as the combination of artistic components within a musical. However, there are less than a handful of studies that interrogate the history or historiography of formal integration in musicals beyond select anecdotes and reflections by composers. This dissertation begins to question the history of formal integration as a term and as an idea, investigating ideas of combining the arts in 1950s studio film production through a detailed case study of the 1954 MGM film musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It outlines the convergence of business, collaborative labour, and creative decisions behind one film, providing new information and perspectives that complicate current histories and theories. In order to understand the role of music and musical numbers in the film, this dissertation builds on existing analytical and historical frameworks found in film, film music, and musical theatre studies including narrative integration, attractions, and thematic integration. It also proposes the term cinematic integration to describe the how different cinematic elements interact with one another. It also analyses the historic social and formal factors that shaped the integration of other attractions in Seven Brides, namely the contentious attraction of a mass kidnapping that pushed the boundaries of light-hearted musical content. This dissertation combines extensive archival research, surveys of contemporary publications, and score analysis. It also develops recent digital methods of audiovisual analysis used in film music and music video studies, proposing frameworks for creating production-informed analyses of formal integration using the annotation software ELAN. It demonstrates the benefit of investigating the variety of collaborative efforts behind creating formally integrated or non-integrated techniques and moments in film musicals in the studio era, lessons that more broadly provide historical precedents to similar processes in the creation of other audiovisual media and musical theatre.